Re: It's weird to be conscious 🤔

I saw Keith Aprilnight discussing the whys and wherefores of consciouness.

This is a big topic. I don't have any answers. Keith says:

> An adult is supposed to know the truth about this life.

That makes me... not an adult, then¹. Cool, I'm going to go outside to play! But before I do, there's one other thing about consciousness that puzzles me.

It's a widely accepted view today that consciousness is "meta"². It's an expression of lower level things happening in the physical parts of our brains. And if we don't see consciousness when we look at brain activity, we're looking wrong. An analogy is a military parade. You see the individual soldiers march by, and maybe the companies and battalions, but you're puzzled that you don't see the army.

I have a problem with this view. Suppose that I model brain activity. I could use: a computer; Lego bricks³; Babbage's Analytical Engine; origami; whatever. I get to a point where my model functions like a human brain⁴. It can do the things that a brain can do, but it's operating with the lights off. It doesn't need consciousness. There seems to be something more that we have that the Lego bricks don't.

Well, that's what I think, but I could be wrong. I bet that my Lego/origami brain would tell me that it experiences consciousness. Maybe the army analogy was correct. I find that hard to believe, but maybe that's because I don't understand what consciousness consists of.

Now I *would* go outside to play, but I'm adult enough that I have to submit a tax return, and the dealine is tomorrow, so I'm staying in.

Footnotes that it's ok to ignore

1. My children asked me when did I start to feel like an adult. I said "When I got my name in the telephone directory." They said "What's a telephone directory?"

2. This view can be called materialism. "It's all just matter - atoms, science, that sort of thing." An opposing view is idealism, which holds that everything is consciousness, or at least that everything is part of some sort of one-ness. For more, read about Buddhism and/or Vedanta, or some German philosophers (I forget which).

3. You can build logic gates out of Lego, so you could build a Lego computer. I'd assume it would be painfully slow and liable to come to bits if kicked in frustration. You wouldn't kick Babbage's Analytical Engine. It would hurt your foot.

4. I know enough about software development to say that a machine that models a brain is a pretty folorn hope. But we can imagine it, and that will do for this thought experiment.

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